I don’t know about your local area and associated limitations but I can speak more generally.

Volunteering your time is a really rewarding thing and it can feel better than donating money. But that is feeling better for you. If you have specific skills, for example web development, then volunteering your time in that expert capacity can be very helpful. If that skillset is not needed then using that skillset to generate funds to donate is more effective. Your efforts are not fungible, but money is, meaning the organisation can use the effect of your efforts in the most beneficial way for their goals, even if it is not a good match for your skills.

Considering specific hours of your work as volunteering hours and donating those hours of earning may help you get the feeling you need, feeling like you are helping and involved, while turning that effort into something useful for the cause you care about.

“On Saturdays I volunteer for my favourite charity by working my normal job and donating the proceeds”

I still occasionally open up Alley Cat which is much easier now that you can do it in a browser.

https://www.playdosgames.com/online/alley-cat/

That’s from 1984 so fairly old, but it just feels amazing. Amazingly clunky, but amazing. I love the fish bowl so much, the mice are evil, and dating is hard for a cat.

I also regularly replay SNES games and recently finished The Legend of Zelda, a Link to the Past. So much fun, such a well balanced game.

For most played it would have to be various solitaire games, especially Fourty Thieves. I have played these so much my phone has burned in card shapes, but that’s fine for me, worth it.

If I exclude cards it is Creeper World 3 which has at least 50 full days of play, but probably much more by now.

Gotta try ZyEl, such a good mod, cranks everything up to 11

Check out Open Arena. It is based in the source for Q3A but it is fully fleshed out with new characters and weapons. Absolutely frenetic and great fun.

+1 for micro machines, though I prefer v3.

And older GTA, GTA2 was my favourite. I play it every so often and always enjoy it, but it is hard to play GTA 1 with modern expectations, they really improved for 2. “And remember, respect is everything”

And fun. It is actually quite fun. The graphics are really nice, right in that midrange of not too low quality to be ugly but not too pretty to cook your machine.

First, the term hysteria is from a fairly mysoginist root, so maybe consider whether that is the best word here.

Second, for all the 8 million plus people killed by COVID it wasn’t hysteria, they died. They didn’t have the sniffles, they died. Dead. Not alive. There isn’t really a lot that is worse as an outcome from a respiratory infection, however we have that too! Tonnes of people who didn’t die have long covid symptoms, strokes, heart attacks, various thrombotic events, loss of function, and additional complications in the rest of their medical issues. On top of that plenty of people had parents, siblings, children, friends, or other people important to them die or become disabled.

Third, digital dependence? I mean, we were moving in this direction for decades before covid. It used to be nobody had phones at all. My partners grandparents remembered the house down the block getting a telephone and went over to see it. They didn’t have electricity. That was less than a century ago. The ramp up of technology over the last century has been insane and accelerating that whole time. In 2004 the coolest phone was a Motorola RAZR flip phone with a terrible 0.3 megapixel camera but a stunning 176x220 pixel display. In 2024 a Pixel 9 has a 1080x2424 display and a 50, 48, and 10.5 megapixel camera. The comparison of a rifle and a spear feels appropriate. We were already heading towards more technology in our lives, it just because super noticeable during lockdowns as it accelerated a little more for a couple of years and it was more obvious.

Fourth, why the quotes around expert? There is such a thing as an expert. Someone who knows more than me doesn’t have to know everything to keep knowing more than me. They can be wrong and learn new things and change their mind all while remaining more informed than I am. In fact, being an expert in a field means doing that constantly. Being at the frontier of knowledge means holding your beliefs more tentatively as you are more likely to change your understanding than an uninformed average person. The fact that they didn’t know how good masks would be at the start isn’t an indictment of their expert status, it is their first guess given previous knowledge. What they did after that is what makes them experts, namely changing their minds when new evidence came about.

Of course they do, especially when the number of people is ambiguous or when they are speaking about someone titled as a profession such as “I went to the doctor and they said…”

It is all a manufactured situation used to push hate and attack the marginalised. Singular they has been around for a very long time and there were options before they was they, not to mention in all the other myriad languages in the world.

None of these, Bruce Willis in the sixth sense.

Calories in, calories out.

For years I believed that the only reason people got fat was because they ate more than they burned and ended up with an excess of energy. It was also the view pushed by the medical profession, by health education at school, and by society in general. I spent years trying to get my weight under control by eating less and moving more.

After a particularly strict period of literally weighing the margarine container before and after buttering toast so I knew how many calories of margarine I used I had gained weight rather than losing even with a 500kcal deficit. I listened to a podcast (Skeptics with a K) in which they interviewed Gary Taubes about the non-caloric hormonal model of obesity. It basically said that if your insulin level was up you couldn’t access body fat, so all the thoughts of that fat being available were flawed and you couldn’t really lose weight in that state. What ended up happening was a reduction in calorie burn and loss of muscle. Fixing the insulin is the first step to managing weight and if you do that you can access your body fat for energy.

It took another year before I actually tried keto and I lost 20kg in the first two months and another 10kg over the next few. It was a massive change but I didn’t sustain it given the environment I was in and ended up gaining a fair bit of the weight back (though not all).

Years later (over a decade, oh no, so old) and I have a much more comfortable body fat percentage and lots more muscle. I carry only a little more than I want and honestly it is too much effort to get down that last little bit, but I feel better now in my late 30s than I did in my early 20s in terms of movement, energy, and cognition. When i get injured I recover quickly, and when I get sick it is usually very short and then over. I used to get sick for weeks at a time and many times per year, now I have only been sick twice this year and both times in December (filthy children, gross but fun).

If you had asked me in 2010 how to manage weight I would have told you, nose firmly in the air, to eat less and move more. So glad to have been wrong.